Marcel Duchamp
The forefather of conceptual art.
Duchamp abandoned painting and exhibited everyday objects – readymades. He moved art from the eye to the mind.
Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 in Blainville-Crevon in Normandy, into a family in which several of the children became artists, among them his brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. He started out as a painter in Paris and tried Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism in quick succession.
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) of 1912 shows a figure dissolved into movement, like a series of photographs laid on top of one another. The Cubists in Paris did not want it in their exhibition. At the Armory Show in New York in 1913 it instead became a scandal and a sensation. The painting is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has the world's largest Duchamp collection.
Shortly afterwards Duchamp tired of what he called “retinal” art, meaning art only for the eye. In 1913 he mounted a bicycle wheel on a stool, and soon he began selecting mass-produced objects and calling them readymades. The best known is Fountain of 1917, a urinal signed R. Mutt, which was rejected by an exhibition in New York. The original disappeared, and the examples in museums today are replicas from later years. The point was that the artist's choice and idea can matter more than craftsmanship.
His principal work is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, known as The Large Glass, on which he worked from 1915 to 1923. It is an enigmatic machine of paint, lead and dust between two panes of glass. A Swedish replica made by Ulf Linde and signed by Duchamp is in the Moderna Museet. He played with words and identities and had himself photographed as his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy.
For long periods he devoted himself mainly to chess and let people believe he had given up art. In secret, however, he built the installation Étant donnés, which became known only after his death in 1968. Duchamp became an American citizen in 1955. His ideas had an enormous influence from the 1950s onwards, on Pop Art, conceptual art and installation art, and he is now regarded as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.